Mountain Xpress Forums

Post An Interesting, Attention-Getting Or Amusing Local Headline

2009-09-16T12:04:02-05:00

This is the counter-thread to the “boring, uninformative” local headline thread.

I’ll start ...

Macon wades gingerly toward transportation plan: It’s the “gingerly” that gets me.

Swayze films all over television: Look at this mess you’ve made. Now there’s Swayze all over my television.

OK, your turn.

metaspam the forums in protest of richey

2009-11-11T20:25:12-05:00

metaspam the forums in protest of richey

The Twitter Oversaturation Effect

2009-11-09T15:18:50-05:00

When it was reported that a building at the Hillcrest Apartments caught fire this morning, there was a large explosion of tweets and re-tweets and even re-ret-weets all over the local Twitter-sphere. To me, this signals two things have happened to Twitter: I follow too many people, and too many people tend to re-tweet without a second thought to signal to noise.

Is this the fault of Twitter for failing to provide a filter so that people who have seen one tweet won’t see a retweet? Or is it a lack of “twittequette”? Or is it something else?

Whatever the case, I was glad to quickly find out what the source of the black smoke I saw was, but I was also amazed and disappointed at the congestion it caused on Twitter.

Blogs and Websites you frequent

2008-12-21T19:11:53-05:00

I’d be interested to know some of the other blogs and websites folks visit for news-related info and dialogue.

(no, sorry, not porn or stupid videos of kittens playing basketball)

Scroo-hoo?
Drudge report?
theglobalreport.org?

NewsFail central ...

2009-10-21T13:16:08-05:00

Let’s talk about failed news. Like this ...

Blue Ridge Parkway has history of body-dumping cases
STAFF REPORTS • OCTOBER 21, 2009 12:15 AM
The Blue Ridge Parkway has been tied to at least eight killings or suspected homicides since 1988, either through the discovery of remains near the scenic byway or through violence within parkway boundaries.

http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091021/NEWS01/910210320/1009

That’s the entire story.

Other local/national examples?

What d’you think of the new Xpress BlogWire feature?

2009-09-24T18:52:38-05:00

In case you haven’t noticed it, it’s a kind of Digg/Fark inspired thing for local blogs and news, built in-house. You can look at it here: http://www.mountainx.com/blogwire/

A network for Asheville’s newspapers, blogs, websites?

2009-09-01T12:38:07-05:00

Recently news arrived that the Asheville Citizen-Times is joining four other newspapers in the U.S. as part of Knight Foundation-funded project to see what happens when daily papers go “hyperlocal” and work with local bloggers.

Here’s the link to the basic announcement about the project, conducted by J-Lab:
http://www.j-lab.org/about/press_releases/networked_journalism_project/

Below is a writeup from J-Lab with more details on the project’s structure and staffing, plus the dollar amounts going to each individual paper.

Networked Journalism Project

J-Lab has a $225,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to do a one-year pilot project that would experiment with how five daily newspapers around the country could effectively partner with at least five independent, hyperlocal news initiatives in their communities.

The newspapers would need to commit to assigning or hiring a person to be a part-time project manager/wrangler and analyst for the project. It would be important that this person have an entrepreneurial mindset. We’d envision the duties of this person would involve:
§ Recruiting the partners.
§ Being the liaison.
§ Figuring out how to amplify good content coming from the community sites -– sharing it, even monetizing it, figuring out how to integrate regional narratives or trends as fodder for professional journalism stories.
§ Paying attention to what works, what doesn’t; what small-J stories reported by the community sites are opportunities for big-J journalism.
§ Attending one start-up meeting to flesh out joint issues among the newspapers and compare ideas for executing the project.
§ Attending one final meeting to report out lessons learned. All travel costs are covered by J-Lab.
§ Send J-Lab short (1-2 page) quarterly reports on what they are learning.

Support for this position: $20,000 per newspaper. (Total $100,000)

Support for each of the 25 participating hyperlocal sites is $5,000 each (Total $125,000)

J-Lab will combine all reports and lessons learned into an overall report on how such a networked experiment worked.

The project wrangler should have the reporting skills to notice possible measures of “success,” which could include such things as:
§ What are the attributes to look for in recruiting partners?
§ What kinds of partners do, or don’t, want to partner with the newspaper?
§ What kinds of partner content was valuable enough that the newspaper gave it an added voice or used it as a basis for enterprise reporting?
§ Were there opportunities to share content among the hyperlocals?
§ What other community sites asked to join the network?
§ How do you maintain a sense of “ownership” among the community partners while also gelling as a “network?” And more….

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the Seattle Times in engaged in another similar project, also funded by Knight Foundation, but separate from the J-Lab project. Seattle Times is partnering with four local news publishers.

Here’s a basic writeup on the SI project:
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/08/The_Seattle_Times_partners_with_neighborhood_news_blogs_55086702.html#comments

Here’s a critical look, at the Seattle Times project, by outside.in blog.
http://blog.outside.in/2009/08/26/seattle-times-partners-with-local-news-sites-is-it-enough/

Outside.in asks three questions:
1) Why isolate the project to just four content publishers? Why not 20 or 100?
2) Why no automation and built-in ability to scale the project up to more providers and more content?
3) What happens after one year, when the funding runs out?

It looks like Asheville is on the cusp of at least one new collaborative effort to network local news outlets. But we’re also engaged in two self-organizing systems that are generating such networks: Facebook and Twitter.

What other efforts should we be engaged in? Given that Asheville is such a grassroots, activist town, it seems natural to expect some cutting-edge efforts.

Obama’s War?

2009-10-14T13:38:38-05:00

The PBS has seen it fit to describe the war in Afghanistan as Obama’s War…I think there is some kind of weird subconscious manipulation going on here. Vietnam wasn’t Kennedy’s War…The Korean War wasn’t Eisenhower’s war..Why do we need to label this Obama’s War? As far as I can tell Obama seems like the most peaceful guy we’ve had in the oval office for quite a while..I think he would withdraw the troops from Afghanistan if it wouldn’t cause a bigger mess… check out the link…I have to ask…

Why is the media painting this as Obama’s War when he obviously is a victim of his circumstance..hell he was a 37 year old doe eyed community worker when the 9/11 happened..

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/?utm_campaign=ObamasWar&utm_medium=NewsSiteTarget&utm_source=image

The official strategy, which Obama announced in March, is to focus more narrowly than in the past on disrupting and defeating Al Qaeda, because that’s our main strategic interest here. That’s where the problem started. That’s the threat to us. And I think Obama wanted to keep the public invested in this war. The only way to do that was to remind them that it was about Al Qaeda at the beginnin, and it’s still about Al Qaeda.

But the problem with that is it leads to a whole series of consequences which take you well beyond defeating Al Qaeda to defeating, or at least pushing back, their allies, the Taliban, who are a sort of diffuse and multi-headed force, and to stabilizing and helping to shore up not just one but two governments, two weak and perhaps even collapsing governments, one in Kabul, the other in Islamabad.

The Mountain Xpress entry in the Knight News Challenge

2008-11-18T19:25:53-05:00

The Mountain Xpress currently has an entry in the Knight News Challenge, and I’d like to hear your feedback and your ideas about how to move news, and this newspaper, further into the digital world.

Here’s the challenge, as described at http://www.newschallenge.org:

We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it!

And here’s the Mountain Xpress idea, which we’ve dubbed the Buncombe Data Mine: we are asking for $75,000 to allow us to collect government databases and transform that information into charts, graphics, maps and other data visualizations that will then be shared with anyone, from journalist to blogger to whatever.

Thoughts? Other ideas? Thanks!

copyright laws…..

2008-10-23T00:22:03-05:00

This editorial by Mark Helprin really made me think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/opinion/20helprin.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

opinions?